314 Hitman Physiology. 



secluded. In Southern Europe, in the higher ranks of life, girls r 

 from the age of puberty, are kept from all maie society but that 

 of near relations until they are married. In England, though 

 there is more freedom of intercourse a freedom which some- 

 times astonishes foreigners boys and girls, and young gentle- 

 men and young ladies, are educated in separate schools. In 

 America there are large schools and colleges where young men 

 and women are educated together, eating at the same tables, 

 reciting in the same classes, and joining in the same amusements. 

 English girls are none the worse for the freedom they enjoy, 

 greater than can be found in France, Spain, or Italy. And, 

 so far as I can judge, the American young ladies, educated in 

 colleges with young men, are in no way inferior to their English 

 sisters who have had the seclusion of fashionable boarding- 

 schools. I am assured by those who have had the best 

 opportunities for experience and observation, that the influence 

 of the sexes upon each other, at such colleges, is highly 

 favourable to intellectual and moral improvement, giving 

 refinement of manners and stability of character. The young 

 men are kept from low associations and vices, and compelled, 

 by the force of female opinion around them, to be on their good 

 behaviour. The young ladies have, perhaps, an equal advan- 

 tage in masculine society. 



The model of a school, one would suppose, must be the 

 family, where boys and girls are born and educated together. 

 The separation that usually takes place at the age of ten or 

 twelve years, is not wholly an advantage to either sex. Boys 

 do not become more manly, in the true sense of the word, when 

 deprived of female society; nor do girls become more womanly 

 in seclusion. Both are deprived of an element of social life, 

 education, and development, and both suffer from its lack- 

 boys becoming rude and bearish, or sinking into a sickly senti- 

 mentalism; and girls equally tending to the two extremes of a 

 morbid misanthropy, or an equally morbid romanticism. I 



